


All their rights respected

by Petra



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Gen, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-13
Updated: 2010-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-10 02:28:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/94437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Ray turns towards the panties, there's a woman at the end of the row staring at him who obviously thinks he's picking out clothes for his jailbait girlfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All their rights respected

**Author's Note:**

> This story is for S., who told me that many of the trans* people she knows were not only in the military, but in the most dangerous duties they could earn, by choice. Other information on and by transgender veterans is available [here](http://www.tavausa.org/).
> 
> Disclaimer: This is fiction based on a fictionalized miniseries based on real life, meaning that it has approximately the same relationship to actual human beings as _Henry V_ fanfiction. None of it should be construed as depicting real people.
> 
> Timeline: Post miniseries.

  
The first year after Iraq is exactly that, every week the first week, second week, third week since.

Iraq plus two months, and Ray's served his time. He goes home, where his goddamn picture's on the wall in the Wal-Mart, where he knows everybody except for the kids his high school classmates had while he was away.

There are more emails and phonecalls, back and forth with the guys stateside and overseas to the ones who are heading back to Iraq, than he knows what to do with.

He doesn't know what to do with himself. If he knew, he probably wouldn't be home, watching more television than anybody should ever watch and turning into Poke's ideal of the fat whiskey tango asshole. If he knew, he would be somewhere. He's not really there, on the couch, Doritos to one side and Coke to the other.

One morning--it's Iraq plus six months, 0200, he's in the trailer Cousin Suzie moved out of, nobody's going to bug him--he gets up and stares at himself in the bathroom mirror for long enough he feels like he's in a soap opera. His hair practically touches his ears now. He's carrying a fuckload of extra weight, because what is there to stay hard for?

Jesus, he's even growing man-boobs.

He takes off his shirt and stares.

The first time he brought a girl home who wasn't his second cousin, his mama broke out the family album and showed her the pictures from naked bathtime, from Ray-Ray's first Christmas, and from the time his big sisters went after him with their makeup and nailpolish and got him all gussied up in a pink, frilly dress.

He felt fucking gorgeous in it, back then, and played it up even harder so nobody would think it was anything but funny.

Good practice for everything else ever, and especially for driving through five billion klicks of desert with his mouth running faster than the unarmored Humvee, and never once saying anything important.

Ray leans his forehead against the mirror and gives up. He is a fucking awesome liar, but he's out of ephedra, he's out of coffee, and he's out of lies he can tell himself.

He could go for a run, twenty runs, beat himself into shape and yell at himself like a drill instructor, or--

He puts his shirt on and gets in the car. No way is he going to the Wal-Mart with his dress blues photo up, not going anywhere near there. He drives, and he talks out loud the whole way to keep himself awake, makes a shopping list, gets it refined by the time he pulls over into a different Wal-Mart, 0530 and far enough from home that he's not going to run into anybody who's ever heard of him.

The lingerie section is his ultimate target, but before he moves in, he performs some fucking recon. As a cover, he grabs a prissy little basket and a bag of manly t-shirts with a picture of a manly dude who is less cut than any Marine who'd survive five seconds in Al Kut.

Thank you, US Marines, for enough training that he can walk by the section twice without really looking and then make a tactical strike.

He's groped enough tits in his time that he knows he's no C cup, not even a B, but American culture is so sex-obsessed and fucked-up that the teen section has the bright red push-up bra of his dreams in an A, plus one covered in little cherry print that is just wrong. He's got to at least try it on, and then there's a pink one and a white one with lacey shit. Band size might be kind of a problem, so he grabs the three biggest ones they've got, in case.

When he turns towards the panties, there's a woman at the end of the row staring at him who obviously thinks he's picking out clothes for his jailbait girlfriend.

Ray gives her his best stone-cold killer stare and she backs off.

On the way to the guys' dressing rooms, he grabs some weak-ass AC/DC fake-antiqued shirt--because civilians don't keep their clothes long enough to make them look old or some shit--and puts it over the girly stuff. Then he ducks in.

It takes a long fucking breath before he gets his shit together to strip down and go for it, but he's done harder shit than try to figure out how to get a flimsy piece of satin and elastic to lie right so it supports the tits he's almost got without digging into his skin worse than sand.

Turns out his ass is a medium in girl sizes, and that shiny red panties look damn stupid over jockeys, but not all that damn stupid.

When he gets a good look at himself, dressed up like a hairy pinup, he's stuck staring. He should look like some fucked-up Thai chick-with-a-dick, but he doesn't.

The bra makes his tits look fucking good. He'd stare at those on some girl for a long time, probably until she punched him.

With his dick stuffed into two layers of underwear, he doesn't even look really--he--anymore.

Which he knew--has known--has really fought like the badass motherfucker of a Recon Marine he is not to know, for a long, long time. A few good men, they said, and no pussy allowed. Fight for your fucking country like a man.

He did that, and now he's here.

Ray's been a man as hard as he could, and he still loves pussy and tits as much as the next guy, provided the next guy isn't Trombley.

He looks down at his own soft little boobies, pressed up and together, brand new since the war, and says, "Hey," to them, like they're some shy girl who are going to run away unless he's real nice. "Hey. I'm Ray."

He looks in the mirror, at the curves he can start to pretend he's got in the right angle.

Says it again. "Hey. I'm Rae."

*

She tells her Mama first, and after a bunch of screaming about fucking faggots when she pulls out her damn porn magazines to prove that she's still into girls, there's a bunch of screaming about lesbos.

After a while, Mama calms the fuck down, enough to say, "I ain't good at that frilly stuff, so don't you come crying to me when you want to put on makeup and can't figure out how."

"Sure, Mama," Rae says.

Marines make do. Rae gets herself a makeover, two hours in the opposite direction from the Wal-Mart where she got the bras and the panties, from a lady with a Mary Kay sign on her yard and a rainbow PFLAG sticker on her car.

Turns out Rae's a winter. Who the fuck knew, other than Rudy?

Her oldest sister keeps calling her Josh, and she doesn't call her anymore.

Michelle does it, too, but she corrects herself and apologizes up one side and down the other until it makes Rae laugh. "Hey, if you decide you're going to be Michael, I'll fuck it up all the time."

There's a silence over the phone for too long. "I'm not going to," Michelle says, too fast.

Rae doesn't bring up the statistics on how many patterns there are with siblings having the same kind of stuff going on, in the first place because Michelle would just hang up and in the second because just because she's made it her mission to learn about this stuff, that doesn't mean everybody else cares. "Okay," she says. "Just stop apologizing so damn much."

From Mama and Michelle, the word gets around, and some cousins don't want Rae anywhere near their precious babies. Some of them don't give a shit.

It makes the first Christmas really fucking weird, though. If she wasn't dealing with phonecalls from all the guys, on and off, she'd be lonely as hell. Even though she's surrounded by family, most of them can't think of anything to say to her.

When her cell rings, it's easy to blame it all on Mama's rules--"Don't you talk to your friends like that where I can hear you"--and take the call into her old bedroom, with the Marine posters still on the walls.

"Hey, Poke," he says. "Merry Christmas, or Feliz Navidad, or whatever."

"Same to you, dawg. How you doing?"

Rae sits on the bed and doesn't tell Sergeant Espera anything about the skirt she's wearing or the eyeshadow that's kind of like the natural look. "Not bad. How's the wife and kids?"

"Good, good. You get the email about the February thing?"

She's been avoiding it, even though she writes back to anybody and calls back anybody as fast as she can. Fick's hosting a thing out in Boston around Presidents' Day, Colbert's going to be done with the Royal goddamn Marines, and the gang will all be there, except for the ones who're deployed.

Everybody's RSVPed except Ray Person, and Rae's not sure she can find him long enough to sign him up for that kind of trip.

"I got some stuff going on, homes," she says. "Don't know if I can make it."

"Fuck that," Poke says. "Is it money?"

She's been doing odd jobs, nothing big, and thinking about college, counseling, the kind of shit she'll have to do to own her body and how much it's going to cost. "No, no. Family stuff. You know." Rae needs a better lie, and she should be able to come up with one, but Poke knows her well enough to see through layers of bullshit.

"Uh-huh. Anyway. You let the captain know when you're sure."

"I will," Rae promises.

"Merry Christmas," Poke says, and hangs up.

Rae fields calls from Hasser, Pappy, and Trombley before she gets up the gumption to call Colbert.

He picks up on the third ring and his voice echoes a little down the long connection. "You'd better not be calling to wish me a Merry Christmas, Person, because you know damn well I don't give a fuck about Christmas."

"No," Rae says, and unlike with the rest of the guys, she keeps her voice lighter, like she has been since she figured shit out.

"No? That's all you've got to say?"

"You're still with the Royal Marines, right?"

Colbert sniffs. "At the moment. So if you do wish me a merry goddamn holiday, I'll have to swim a long way to kick your ass, but rest assured, I will do so."

Rae runs her fingers through her hair--it's almost collar-length now--and smiles. "This Marine has the utmost faith in your ability to keep your promises, Sergeant."

"I already heard about Q-Tip's baby from Hasser, who had the unmitigated gall to call earlier. What do you want?"

The good thing about doing this kind of conversation over the phone is that Colbert's far enough away that he can't physically kick her ass. The bad thing about it is that if he was right there, he'd already have enough clues to figure out what the hell's going on, and she wouldn't have to spit it out. "I'm, um." She coughs.

Colbert waits. Thirty seconds later, he says, "You know how much I would've given for a little companionable fucking silence in the desert?"

"Yeah?"

"I'll give you exactly that much if you get to the point."

Rae tightens her hand into a fist until her nails dig into her palm. "I'm transitioning," she says, and then remembers that's probably not a word he hears every day. She didn't know it until she already knew she needed to do it. "I'm living as a woman."

Colbert laughs in her ear, which is way the fuck better than all sorts of shit she could be getting from the Iceman. "You're fucking with me, right?"

"No," Rae says, and tries to figure out how to prove it long distance without compromising pictures. "I mean it, I'm--it's who I am."

"No fucking way." Colbert's voice is soft, now, too calm.

"On my fucking honor as a Marine, I shit you not."

This time he goes quiet. "If this is all some fuck-witted, glue-sniffing lead up to your singing that fucking Shania Twain song at me, I am going to reach through this goddamn phone and rip off your balls."

Rae snorts. "You'd be doing me a fucking favor. Do you have any idea how hard it is to convince the VA to do jack shit for you when you realize you're in the wrong fucking body?"

He's back to bantering. "Fuck, Person, you didn't introduce yourself right, did you? If you go in there on Ripped Fuel and forty hours no sleep, they'll cut your dick off in half an hour."

"I'm not fucking joking, Brad."

"Fuck," Brad says, and there's another pause. "What're you going to change your name to, then? Billy Jo? Darlene? Lulu?"

Rae swallows. "I'm spelling Ray with an E, that's all. Makes it easier to remember."

"Well." Somewhere, Colbert clears his throat. "Rae with an E, if you're still a fucking Marine, you get your ass on that computer and tell everybody you're coming to the big get-together, and if anyone gives you shit about showing up on a full-on prom dress with spangles and a tiara, I'll tell them you're my date and hold them down while you kick their fucking asses."

Rae's mouth is so dry she has to swallow three times before she can talk. "Yeah?"

"Unless turning into a girl has made you some commie bitch who'd rather sit around and paint her toes than kick sense into some numbskulled motherfuckers who never thought you were good enough while you still had a dick."

There's enough of a dare there that she sits straighter, practically at attention. "No, Sergeant."

"Then stop being such a fucking pussy." Colbert fakes a double-take. "Oh, wait, you can't anymore. Well, cowgirl the fuck up and stop running up your damn phone bill."

Rae's shaking. She lets out a slow breath instead of something worse. "Didn't know if you'd still want me there."

"You're still Rae Person and I hate your mouth, your singing, and your jokes," Colbert says, and maybe he's thinking the other damn spelling, but it doesn't matter. "And if you don't show up, I will assign a team to recon your trailer park and get your ass to the East Coast if they have to cut you in quarters to carry you."

It sounds as much like "I'd rather have you on my side than any ten men" as Colbert's insults ever have. Rae grins. "Thanks."

"Merry fucking Christmas," Colbert says, and hangs up.

*

Rae wears jeans and no makeup to the bar where the rendezvous is. Her hair's almost to her shoulders, and she's got a bra and girl panties on under her clothes, but whatever Colbert said, she's not going in there without a little plausible deniability.

"Who let the hippie fuck in here?" Poke says, and slugs her in the shoulder before he hugs her.

"It's been too long," Rae says, and thumps him good and hard.

"Like your damn hair. What the hell, man?"

She's been thinking of having it cut, but if it's too short it'll make her feel less like herself. "Just trying it out."

"It's almost as long as my Isabel's was, before she figured out she could cut it herself." Poke narrows his eyes. "Don't you try that, Person. Her bangs were shorter than your dick."

Rae whistles appreciatively and tosses her hair, playing it up. "No, I like it long and flowing."

Poke shakes his head. "What you been up to?"

The version of the months since Iraq that Rae's put together sounds flat as fuck compared to the truth: time off, little jobs, nothing big. No major life-changing events.

"You got a girl?" Poke asks when Rae's done reeling off the list of nothing.

"Man, I wish. Turns out I got sand ground into all sorts of places over there, so the first girl I tried to fuck, I kissed her, rubbed her good, and she jerked away from me like I was covered in sandpaper." Rae holds up her hands while Poke chuckles. The calluses have shifted, but she still has some. "See? I don't know what to do with my hands in bed anymore, so the last fifty girls, I just ate 'em out."

"Fifty?" Colbert says behind Rae. "You told me there was only one girl in your life."

Rae shouts, "Brad!" and tackles him to get the subject changed as fast as she can. It devolves into an impromptu wrestle that she loses as fast as ever, then noogies. "Fuck," she says, and elbows him until he lets her go. "You know, I missed your stupid face until I saw it again."

Colbert grins at her. "Missed you, too, till you opened yours."

Everyone who shows up gives Rae shit about her hair, and when Fick gets there he does his best--crappy--Sixta impression, going on and on about the grooming standard until Kocher shouts him down. It's fine for hours, shooting the shit and catching up.

Colbert catches her on her way out of the men's bathroom when there's nobody else in that part of the bar and snaps her bra strap. "Can't believe you're wearing that," he says.

"It makes me feel pretty." Rae scowls at him. "Haven't those European dick-suck limey faggots converted you yet?"

"Bar full of Recon Marines and you're all dressed up," Colbert says, and shakes his head slowly. "You are one brave fucker."

Rae looks at the bar, where most of the guys are still drinking, and at the pool table, where Rudy is schooling Hasser but good. No one's looking at her. "Nobody said anything."

"The good ones know there's something going on." Colbert pats her shoulder, slow and heavy, while she breaks out in a cold sweat. "Couple of them asked me, but I got your six."

"Yeah?"

Colbert smiles. "I told them we had a bet. You keep the girly underwear on all weekend, I owe you five hundred bucks. "

The part of Rae that wants to be brave wants to shout the truth to everyone, but that would go pretty fucking badly. It was hard enough to be honest with Colbert, and the only bastard in here who owes her as much as he does is Hasser. Maybe when she's closer to the big, no take-backs, no fudging it transition, she'll tell the ones who might listen without freaking the fuck out, but not everybody, not all at once, not when they're at least half drunk and it's a long fucking way home.

"Thanks," Rae says, and socks him in the shoulder.

"I told the captain the truth," Colbert says, and looks past Rae.

"Fuck. Why?"

Colbert shakes his head slowly. "Sometimes I despair of your intelligence in all possible ways and by all measurements available to me. Because he's a liberal Ivy League-dwelling WASPy civilian now, and he gets all pissed off about shit like Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

Rae rubs her eyes and is briefly grateful that she's not wearing eye makeup. "It doesn't apply to my ass anymore."

"A good officer's got to know his people's strengths and their vulnerabilities so he can deal with their challenges," Colbert says. "Now go play, Person. If I don't take a piss right now, my kidneys are going to rise up and strangle me, and then strangle you for talking to me so long."

Fick is sitting with Gunny Wynn, and when Rae comes over, trying to walk like a man without walking like a man trying to walk like a woman, he nods to her with that bland officer face that doesn't tell her a damn thing about what he's thinking. "Person," he says, like any other day.

"Captain," Rae says, and orders herself another drink.

"Hey, Ray," Wynn says. "We were running over the schedule of weddings and christenings for the upcoming year. Do you have a mission to add?"

"Nothing." Rae looks at the bar and tries to remember when her last real date was. Too long ago. "Sorry, sir."

Fick clears his throat. "You've got nothing to apologize for."

Rae looks up and meets his eyes for a second. Fick winks. "Are you sure about that, sir? 'Cause I've done all kinds of wild shit. There was this one road trip I took with a bunch of guys, and fuck, but we blew up a whole lot of stuff."

Fick sighs softly and Wynn shakes his head. "No more to apologize for than the rest of us, at least," Fick says.

Rae smiles. "Thank you, sir."


End file.
